Many companies operate in an extremely cost conscious environment. In many cases product markets will not support an increase in the price of the products, despite the pressures from economic factors such as inflation, to raise the prices. Therefore companies are looking within to determine how to reduce the cost of manufacturing the products. A company may increase their profit associated with a product by reducing the cost of manufacturing the product, as opposed to raising the price of the product. One such cost reduction process has been to manually review the parts, or components, that are used to manufacture the product, and manually make associations of the parts with cost. For example, a process of manually establishing a projected cost of a part based on physically identifiable features (e.g., the number of holes in a part) was used. That is, based on past experience it may have been determined that it took one minute to cut a hole in a part. Based on the current labor rate, and the number of holes, the cost of the holes in the part being reviewed could be estimated. Other features such as this were added together to project the cost of a part. This form of part review may be performed for some parts. However, when the number of parts is large, the process clearly becomes overwhelming. In addition, the reliability of manual review is suspect because it is dependent on reviewing physically identifiable features, and often misses underlying interactions that may impact cost.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.